Hacker News Reader

Comment by kowdermeister | Hacker News Reader

Not remotely true, the web isn't dying, it's changing, but that's less clickbaity :) For such a hard claim you have to specify what do you exactly mean by "the web".

"The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party."

This web is still alive and well, nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish. Tim was a bit naive that he assumed profit seeking won't mess with his creation.

The underlying protocol is still the same as it was 20 years ago. With 3,885,567,619 internet users this dying platform is the best thing in computing we had so far. Of course it's changing, but the web is much larger than GOOG, FB, AMZN.

Yo are ignoring the long tail and that tail is very long.

View on HN

> nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish.

plenty does!

if you don't rank on google for whatever it is you're launching/publishing -- you don't exist.

you could try sharing it with friends on facebook and hope for a social network effect, but just ask the journalism industry how organic reach is working out as of late

selling something online? your only hope is FBA. where the A stands for Amazon. I guess etsy might work too. so, okay...duopoloy!

and even if you don't care to be found, and aren't selling anything, it is TRIVIAL to take down any kind of not-expensive hosting (your raspi @ home, your DigitalOcean VPS, or colocated server) with a DDoS attack.

AWS, GCP, & Azure can weather most attacks, but it will cost you. And if it's large enough they'll shut you off anyway. and then send you a bill you can't pay.

so no, there is plenty stopping you from launching anything on the internet. the cost structures (be it time or money or both) greatly favor the massively entrenched incumbents. and not a little bit of favor. they favor them....bigly.

You're confusing "making money" with launching/publishing. I can publish anything I want to the web in under a minute. Who's stopping me? Getting people to read what you've published has been difficult since the early days of the web, but publishing is trivial.

And, yet, network effects being what they are, how does anyone with an independent thought rise to visibility, outside of someone else's platform, when the "web" completely dominated by 100 web properties?

I don't know, make it be the individuals problem to spread their individual and original thought. That might sound harsh so I clarify a bit.

If I have a big, world changing individual thought and I create something good, then it will probably be picked up by the endless blogs, magazines, journals. I can place it on GitHub or buy a $10 server and I'm good to go, in that case I manage almost everything about it. It's not the web's jobs to filter out the gems.

If my individual thought is not much better than "Mondays suck" then Twitter is probably a good place for it to be forgotten.

That's a different question and has nothing to do with the web dying, which it isn't. The freedom to put your voice out there has never included the right to be heard or popular. You have more ability today to be heard than ever before, but you're one of billions, it's not supposed to be easy.

if fb and google don't like you, you can't put your voice out there if they control everything

They don't control everything, they never have, and they never will.

"This web is still alive and well, nobody stops you from grabbing a domain name and launch anything you wish"

True, you'll be able to do that, but if most of people will have "free internet package" that will allow them to access GOOG, FB, AMZN only, having the domain will not make much sense.

Exactly. This reminds me of the 1990's AOL's walled garden model that ultimately lost to the open Web.

I wonder though, if we really descent into a multi-tier internet and if a version of a "legacy" internet survives in some form (even though not accessible by main stream FB/GOOG users), if that legacy part of the internet will become cleaner and once gain open to grass roots innovation?

Today most people have a paid access to the internet. How many people do you think will downgrade to free and get rid of 99% of the available websites? For newcomers it can be problematic, but I don't see it happening on a mass scale.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com